List of Shifting Stories On Russia Meetings

Ken AshfordL'Affaire Russe, Trump & AdministrationLeave a Comment

With the revelation this weekend that Trump Jr met with Russians to get dirt on Hillary Clinton, things are starting to fray.  For their insistence that there is nothing to the Russian collusion scandal, there does seem to be an odd history of people in this administration forgetting Russia meetings.

Yeah, we need to keep these things in a list now.  Here’s a list of the times Trump campaign and/or administration officials have changed their stories (or where facts have since contradicted statements) about Russian interactions.

  • In January, during the transition, incoming vice president Mike Pence asked incoming national security adviser Mike Flynn if Flynn had been in contact with the Russians regarding sanctions against the country in late December by the outgoing Obama administration. On January 15, Pence said on CBS’s Face the Nation that Flynn had not discussed these sanctions with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, in late December. Flynn later admitted that he and Kislyak had discussed the sanctions, and also that the two had had more conversations during the transition than he had previously told Pence.
  • On the same Face the Nation appearance, Pence categorically denied that anyone in the Trump campaign had “any contact with the Russians.”
  • In March the New Yorker reported that Jared Kushner and Mike Flynn had met with Kislyak at Trump Tower in early December in order to create “a more open line of communication in the future,” according to the White House. The Washington Post reported in May that Kislyak reported on his Kushner-Flynn meeting, which took place on either December 1 or December 2, to his superiors in Russia in a communication intercepted by U.S. intelligence. Kislyak told Moscow Kushner had discussed the idea of “setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin, using Russian diplomatic facilities.” The White House did not comment on this report.
  • Kushner’s meeting with Kislyak was among several meetings with Russian officials the 36-year-old White House aide did not disclose on a form he filled out to receive a security clearance. (Another transition-era meeting was with the head of a Russian state-owned bank.)
  • During his confirmation hearing on January 10, soon-to-be attorney general Jeff Sessions was asked what he would do if there were “any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign.” Sessions responded that he was unaware of any such activities and that in his own role on the campaign he “did not have communications with the Russians.”
  • But it was quickly discovered that Sessions had met Sergey Kislyak twice since endorsing Trump for president in February 2016. The first was a brief encounter after an event at which Sessions was speaking at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. The second was on September 8 in Sessions’ Capitol Hill office. Sessions defenders noted that the first encounter was a talk with several ambassadors, of which Kislyak was just one, and that the second was listed on the Alabama senator’s public schedule and a reasonable meeting for a member of the Senate Armed Services committee to hold.

Since we’re keeping lists, here’s a helpful timeline: